gaius

Many years ago I was working on a project for a major UK high street bank, and on the team was a designer who genuinely believed "users like a challenge". No users do not like a challenge. Users like spending the absolute minimum time possible doing their online banking, then they like getting on with their lives.

I believe he later went on to win loads of awards... as judged by other designers. Anyway a large part of why the web sucks and runs like molasses is guys like that.

https://www.gofundme.com/my-rover-sitter-killed-my-dog

http://www.roversdirtysecret.com/tag/killed/

India has nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers and a space programme.

Companies stick with Oracle and IBM for multi-decade stretches, maybe the move to cloud will be what it takes to dislodge them, but then again, in a world where Azure, AWS and GCP exist some people still choose Oracle and IBM, so there's no explaining it.

If I were a CIO I would announce that this year's bonuses will be funded from savings on Oracle licenses, then sit back and let nature take its course.

Well, yes and no. It’s true that university is expensive (but you don’t need to repay loans until you are earning over a certain threshold). However it’s also true that if you take an apprenticeship a) you will be paid during training and b) a skilled tradesman or tradeswoman can easily out-earn most graduates, and this is well known.

The low-hanging fruit in ML is absurdly low these days, the tools are very good and there is loads of sample code available. If you were already good with Python or R, and already had some nice clean data, you could be doing something useful with Keras in a day, no joke.

But sure, intonation is a thing. "I beg your pardon" can be said in a threatening way.

Well that kinda was the concept - but they greatly underestimated the difficulty of producing a "sufficiently smart compiler". If VLIW had worked it would have greatly simplified processor design, no (or at least much less) need to worry about cleverly handling out-of-order execution for example. That in turn would have meant e.g. bigger L1 caches because you would have the die space to play with, or more execution units, or whatever.

It didn't work out and Intel did make some stupid decisions along the way (also underestimating the importance of backwards compatibility with existing code - not only binaries, but you also needed to be able to compile existing source well) but it was worth a punt, and maybe will be again someday - maybe a DL-based compiler could produce good VLIW code? Maybe a new (or old) language will be more amenable to VLIW compilation than C?

Yes and no. The B in UBI is basic, you won't starve or freeze but if you want nice things such as a new gaming PC, you would still need to earn to pay for that. Maybe in that world you would do just enough work to earn it, then not bother working again until you needed to upgrade - and that's OK.

Citation needed. The Swiss have done a pretty good job of defending the Vatican of course, but when was their military last tested for real?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_Switzerlan...

(the answer is WW1)

But "the public" isn't one thing. The right-wing half of the public respect the military, and the left-wing half despise it while revelling in the freedom it provides, which also includes the freedom to despise it. I mean back in Soviet Russia if you spat on the uniform of a soldier of the Red Army, I imagine you would have been in alot of trouble. Or in China with the PLA.

Wasn’t it from 10% to 8%? That 2% is misleading there, it makes it look far less significant than it was.

Google’s human-resources department presents potential ways to cut the company’s $20 billion compensation budget

I guarantee there are cost savings to be had in the HR department, but I bet there was no slide on that

The problem is the massive influx of newcomers to the industry who have no experience and crow very loudly that experience doesn’t matter, or that their 6-week bootcamp is as good as a degree+decades of experience. Well the joke will be on them too one day, they are just too inexperienced to realise it.

Consider that We The People developed a legal framework for companies to exist as the existence of companies as a thing was deemed to be a net good. But what if it isn’t any more, if companies are purely focused on profits at the expense of the legal and social environment in which they exist? Then the law can be amended.

Worker: but you set the policy, it can be whatever you want it to

HR: ...

Saying “policy” must be a cover for a real reason that the company wants kept secret

Well there’s the rub isn’t it. I don’t think most people would consciously decide to rat out their friends secrets for $20 - or indeed for any price. But somehow, it’s happening.

OK let’s imagine that you have a close friend or family member with some confidential issue - maybe an illness, maybe debt, maybe they are in the closet. Occasionally they message you, on old -fashioned SMS or email mentioning something about it.

How many dollars is a reasonable trade to tell a data collection agency everything you know so they can add it to their file on your friend/relative?